According to Dave Brailsford, the man often credited with Britain’s extraordinary cycling success, his techniques could as easily be applied to other sports, or indeed any other field of activity, to produce the same outstanding results. Already he’s being talked of as a possible saviour for English football. But perhaps his talents would be better directed at the economy. If Britain could be even half as successful in business as it has been at these Olympics, then our troubles would be over.

Much is often made of the parallels between sporting, business and economic success, but beyond the obvious – goal setting, dedication, planning and self-discipline – I’m not convinced there is much of a read across. If there was, you would expect to see more top sports people in business leadership positions. In fact there are remarkably few, and even fewer go on to be outstanding entrepreneurs.

None the less, there are plainly important lessons to be learnt from Britain’s cycling coup. Almost five years to the day since the start of the credit crunch, the UK economy still languishes some 4.5 per cent below its pre-crisis peak, and according to comments this week from Sir Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, we may have years of pain still to go before sunlit pastures are glimpsed. A little advice from the likes of Mr Brailsford would not go amiss.

Growth remains non-existent, meaningful deficit reduction keeps on being shunted further into the future, and living standards continue to be squeezed. Despite all this, Britons are still living well beyond their means, spending far more than they earn on world markets.

Truly awful trade figures yesterday confirm that the hoped-for shift away from imports, debt and consumption towards exports, investment and saving is proceeding at glacial speed. The gap between exports and imports is once again at record levels. How are we managing to sustain such an obviously unsustainable state of affairs? By continuing to borrow from abroad is the answer. If the Coalition had a mission, it was to deal with the country’s debts. More than two years in, little, if any, progress has been made.

You could argue that the Government has been unlucky. A combination of strongly rising commodity prices and the eurozone’s apparently interminable debt crisis has knocked the recovery strategy badly off course. The problem with the latest trade figures is not that imports have soared but that exports to the eurozone are plummeting. The renewed strength of the pound makes us feel richer, but it also steepens the task of restoring lost competitiveness to the UK economy.

Looking at where we might have been given the scale of the banking collapse, it could also be argued that policy has done a relatively good job in protecting the economy from worse outcomes. A semblance of stability has been maintained. But, as Mr Brailsford would no doubt be quick to tell the Government, we are still a million miles away from a winning formula. The problem of excessive private sector debt has hardly been addressed at all, but merely transferred on to the public balance sheet, creating a whole new aspect of the crisis. The banking sector remains gripped by a poisonous mix of excessive leverage and still mountainous, unrecognised bad debt. Until these overhangs are dealt with, there will be no new credit origination or growth of any significance.

The US has hardly covered itself in glory over the past five years either, but despite the fact that the crisis originated there, there was in truth never as much of a problem with the US banks as the British and European ones, and in any case, America seems to have dealt better with the aftermath of the sub-prime meltdown than we have. Banking, household and corporate debt in the US has now fallen to manageable levels. A slow, but sustained, recovery – helped by relatively low levels of taxation – has taken hold.

In Britain, by contrast, policy seems to have been directed more at treating the symptoms of the disease than its causes. The tax burden has been increased, rather than decreased, further damaging purchasing power, and negligible progress has been made in cutting current spending by the public sector.

The policy seems to be an attempt to return us to the way we were in Brown’s Britain, an impossible as well as undesirable goal, rather than to recognise the world has changed and react accordingly. Rather than addressing the banking crisis by nationalising the bad debt and putting it into run-off, banks have been frog-marched by overzealous regulation into a debilitating, long-drawn-out process of deleveraging, which is starving the real economy of credit.

With Olympic euphoria in full flood, Sir Mervyn King sounded off message when he issued his storm warning this week, but he only spoke the truth. There is no quick fix coming from Europe, where intractable national differences preclude any kind of meaningful resolution to the sovereign debt crisis. Nor, unless there is a rapid change in stance, does there appear to be much hope of salvation from the Coalition. Set your long-term goal and plan your path, Mr Brailsford would no doubt advise. In politics as in business, it is rarely that straightforward.

Policy is fast sinking into a Japanese-style state of paralysis. David Cameron should take note. It’s not just economic stagnation that awaits if nothing is done. The average life expectancy of Japanese prime ministers since the country’s two decades of lost growth began has been little more than a year.